The scapegoat is gone.
Daniel Jones is no longer a Giant.
So now Joe Schoen and Brian Daboll have no quarterback to hide behind.
Now they have Sunday’s home game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Thursday’s Thanksgiving Day visit to the Dallas Cowboys to stop their operation from being an absolute circus.
Or else it will be worth monitoring if co-owner John Mara has to go back on his vote of confidence in both the GM and coach — or if co-owner Steve Tisch is finally going to put his foot down.
The Giants (2-8) lost to the Carolina Panthers before their bye week. Then they shut down Jones, who requested and was granted his release on Friday.
Eyes are rolling in the locker room. Daboll has turned up pressure on his defense. The defense knows it has to play perfectly for the team to win.
Tommy DeVito is a well-liked teammate whom the players support personally, but skipping over season-long No. 2 Drew Lock without giving him a start has created a lot of confusion.
The players see what this is: the Giants don’t have a plan. They are just reacting and making isolated decisions by the seat of their pants.
The Giants’ players are still zeroing in on their own jobs to try to put good football on tape.
But choosing DeVito looks, optically, like an effort to keep fans in the seats a couple more weeks and to earn a higher draft pick in April.
Daboll probably truly believes DeVito gives him a better chance to win than Lock, because if the Giants keep losing, it’s going to cost the head coach his job and likely the GM, too.
And if DeVito’s presence at quarterback leads to the offense and team looking even worse, it’s going to invite more speculation that the Giants are tanking.
And Mara, who has said repeatedly that he will never tank and that the integrity of the game matters more than anything, will not stand for that.
If the dysfunction ratchets up, though, how could this not become a house-cleaning?
Jones isn’t here anymore to get blamed for everything. The accountability now will land where it belongs. Take the offensive coaching staff for example:
The February “promotions” of offensive coordinator Mike Kafka to “assistant head coach” while stripping him of playcalling, and of quarterbacks coach Shea Tierney to “offensive passing game coordinator,” were part of one of the more inexplicable announcements in recent memory.
The motivation was transparent: Daboll and the Giants were doing optics damage control after defensive coordinator Wink Martindale and several other assistants had voluntarily left the staff the previous two seasons due to the dysfunction of the coach’s operation.
Kafka tried to leave for the Seattle Seahawks but was blocked from doing so and given a shinier title. Tierney, Daboll’s apprentice from Buffalo, was given a reward. So the offense averaged 15.6 points per game, 30th in the NFL, and the two assistants coaching the QB got promoted.
Fast forward to Thursday and Friday, and Kafka and Tierney wanted no part of discussing the Giants’ inability to get more out of Jones as they sit last in the NFL in scoring at the same average of 15.6 points per game.
Kafka distanced himself from the Jones news in a preamble and said: “If anyone has any questions about Tampa, I’d gladly take those.”
Tierney was asked why Jones’ development didn’t progress to avoid this kind of disappointment.
“It’s too early for reflection on that,” Tierney said on the day Jones requested his release from the organization.
Both Kafka and Tierney said they would not be calling plays down the stretch of this season. That was a relevant question because last season, when Kafka was the full-time playcaller, Daboll had taken it away from Kafka multiple times, including giving it to Tierney for the second half of a loss at Dallas.
“No I’ve never — I’m not the play caller, never have been,” Tierney said, despite his half of play calling in Dallas. “So that’s [Daboll] and Kafka.”
Defensive coordinator Shane Bowen, meanwhile, who has been accountable and insightful this season, made a strange comment about his defense’s inability to create turnovers.
He said that when “you play man [coverage], it gets hard,” because “the main objective of man coverage is to make sure your guy doesn’t catch the ball.
“So when you’re in those man coverages, it gets a little hard because you’re focused on driving and closing space,” Bowen added. “And you’ve got to play through the hands a little bit more where you don’t have as much vision to break on some throws.”
That was a wild statement, considering Martindale was criticized for playing too much man-to-man, and his Giants defense tied for the NFL lead with 31 takeaways last season.
Listen: wins and better football can fix or conceal a lot. But when a team is this poorly run and doesn’t get results on the field, people pay the price.
Jones just did. Now he’s gone.
If the Giants keep losing, who will be next?
